Day: August 13, 2004

Failure is not an option. It comes with the software.

Ladies and gentlemen, I rule.

The cube works. Did a clean reinstall from scratch, and now everything is hunky-dory. It's my firm suspicion that XP SP2 was being a nasty bugger and messing something up.

Anyway, everything works and life is good. This merits a happy dance.

Woke up at 3:30 this morning, completely fucked up, having work-related nightmares again. In my dream, I was trying to figure out what was wrong with the friggin server I'm trying to install. I hate it when that happens.

Those dreams seem to vivid, and they're really frustrating. it's the sort of dream where you have to get something done, but everything is working against you, and you feel like the world will end if you don't get it to work… I woke up really tense, with a nasty pain in my shoulder – the one I usually get when I'm turning into a big stressball.

Must seriously contemplate a career change.

Today will be the suck.

How do I know this? Because I'm doing something innately stupid and time-consuming. Bossman found us a client. Of course, he gave impossible deadlines for little money. Go boss… The project isn't all that hard. We need to port a commercial website written in ASP running in IIS and based on MS SQL Server to one written in Java/JSP in Apache/Tomcat based on mySQL. For those of you who aren't that tech-savvy, it's no big deal to do.

Except that, bossman being well… a boob, he told the guys we'd be willing to host their servers at our office. The only windows machine we had was a coworker's desktop – really not the best place to host a production website! So we buy a new windows box, and I've been assigned to install all the crap that needs to run on it. Now bear in mind that I've never worked with IIS/SQL Server, but I figure I'm smart enough to muddle through the basics.

So after walkies yesterday with Josie and MJ, I get back to the office, roll up my shirtsleeves and have at it. Install XP, no worries. SQL Server, no problem. IIS, simple. Migrate the old website to the new box, fairly straightforward. Try to migrate the database from the old machine to the new one? All hell breaks loose.

Seriously.

My coworker and I – whose cumulative experience with SQL Server is roughly 6 hours in total – encounter the most frustratingly weird set of problems we've ever come across. Things that should work… don't. Things that work one way don't work in another. And to make matters worse, in our tinkering to try and get the new server to work, we killed the old one. You could beat us to death with a stick and we wouldn't be able to tell you what we did wrong. Which, considering WE'VE NEVER WORKED WITH THOSE TECHNOLOGIES, is quite normal.

And, of course, the only two people who have worked with them are not in the office and probably won't be until monday. *throws hands up in the air*

So today, I am starting the whole process from scratch, and hopefully I will get the damn thing to work. Honestly, I don't really care if I do. That's a problem…